The San Francisco company Tulchin Research is out with some fun polling of California voters that fleshes out the intersection of tech and politics. Among the findings:

• Have an iPhone? You're likely a Jerry Brown voter. Fifty-seven percent of Apple phone-havers back Brown, a Democrat, in the California governor's race, while 31% like Republican candidate Meg Whitman; 12% might be sold on their phone choice, but are undecided in the race.
• Wait, you're a BlackBerry user? Then there's about a one in two chance that you're a Whitman fan; 38% of RIM customers prefer Brown.

• Seventy-two percent of voters in the state who are under the age of 40 have a Facebook account -- which is 13 more percentage points than those who subscribe to cable television.

More here. (Thanks Matt Lockshin)

Nestled among the countless start-up profiles over on TechCrunch is a lovely look from Sarah Lacy at what the east African country of Rwanda is doing to get Rwandans online and connected. There's the promising: cheap cell phones, extensive fiber rollout, Rwandan students being sent to the Indian Institutes of Technology for training. And the cultural and structural challenges that made tech difficult, from a cash-based society that hinders e-commerce to the fact that few modern online resources come with Kinyarwanda translation. The goal is a thriving economy with opportunity for many that can act like a stabilizing political force. Worth a read.

You might notice that, as Lacy frames it, Rwandan entrepreneurs and government officials are starting from the bottom up, and attempting to build a web 2.0 culture similar to, for example, what we see in the U.S. A new project called Weather for All from the Global Humanitarian Forum (led by Kofi Annan), the World Meteorological Organization, Jeffrey Sachs' Earth Institute at Columbia University, and mobile companies Zain and Ericsson, is working to build on the existing infrastructure of cell phone towers throughout Africa by attaching automated weather stations to the towers that then use the mobile network to distribute critical information about weather to the 700 million or so people throughout Africa who depend on farming for their livelihoods. And freeing them from some of the uncertainty over how they might get their daily bread is one step towards the development of a stronger civil society. Also worth a read.

(Photo credit: Ericsson)

Last year over on the Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey told the story of how Virginia Tech is attempting to address the pervasive educational problem of resources going in one direction (as in, down) while demand goes the other. (Via an Ezra Klein link) The solution for VaTech? Technology. As in a "Math Emporium" computer room housed in the atrium of a Blacksburg, Virginia shopping mall that has seen better days. To describe the space, Carey makes use of all the adjectives you might expect: gray, windowless, "used to house a five-and-dime." (The emporium's official site does a better job finding the silver lining of conducting higher education in a shopping mall, boasting of "plenty of free parking.") But the commercial space is a cheap way for a math and science based institution to use technology to train undergraduates on the basics before they're sent to real human professors for polishing.

As interesting as it is to use technology to solve the problem of an industry where financial advisors recommend that students and parents budget with the expectation that tuition will increase at twice the rate of inflation, it does raise a question: Do I really want to go to college in a mall? Or, more to the point, what do I tell a potential employer when it comes up that I took freshman calculus from a computer while seated next to a Cinnabon? What happens when our cultural expectations and, yes, biases lag behind what technology makes possible? Those sorts of questions are the kind of ones that will be facing the new U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra as he aims to figure out how to use what we know about technology to build a better, stronger, smarter America. Thankfully, Chopra himself has already started asking those questions. As Virginia's Secretary of Technology, Chopra saw MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative as a model for the power of technology to fix the inefficiencies and inequalities of higher education. But Chopra admitted, "We don't know as a society how HR departments will value that you've taken 30 hours of MIT coursework." To be a successful CTO, Chopra will have to find answers on how society will value what technology makes possible. (Photo by ȠĬGEL)

Since it's Friday, let's touch on something slightly different from our usual topics: World War II. Or more specifically, radar. More, more specifically, how the untested and unproven and -- let's face it -- very weird and possibly demonic technology of detecting objects using only invisible radio beams flying through the air came to be accepted as part of the British Empire's strategic bulwark against Nazism. The journal Nature has just posted an excerpt from Charles Percy Snow's 1961 book Science and Government. In it, Snow fleshes out his strikingly controversial (for the time) argument that literary intellectuals and scientists each exist in one of "two cultures," unable to break the bounds of those cultures to communicate with one another; think of it as Liberal Arts Majors Are from Mars, Geeks Are From Venus. Snow tells the tale of how creative thinkers of the era were able to break through their respective bubbles to make convincing cases for the government taking a risk on this groundbreaking technology in their fight against Hitler. Some of that cross-cultural negotiation had to happen inside what Snow calls "closed government." Some of it played out out in the open. And a big factor, to which Snow devotes much attention, was the competing egos and personality quirks of the relevant players.

Lucky for us, our leaders are without ego or quirk. Still, Snow's story about the intersection of technology and politics is illuminating as we consider how we get the United States circa 2009 back on the cutting edge of technological innovation. And the fact that World War II turned out as it did is a point in favor of making the attempt. (Photo by Dave Pearson)

Yesterday was challenging for the new Obama administration as two key individuals nominated for appointments removed their names from consideration. I was at the White House asking questions about the plans for the CTO and White House technology. Witnessing the heated afternoon press briefing, there was definitely some pressure being put on the administration to respond about whether they were perhaps moving too quickly on these cabinet and senior appointments.

I asked Nick Shapiro, White House spokesman on technology related topics, whether what we've been hearing about a possibly diminished role of the CTO was true. Essentially the answer is no.

Fenty and CTO Vivek Kundra created an integrated strategy combining transparent operations, so the public and watchdogs can analyze District operations, plus new tools to help DC workers become more efficient and, the icing on the cake, a wildly-successful program directly involving the public in generating low-cost ideas for services.

The key to all 3 is making available to the public and employees (frequently on a real-time basis!) previously hard-to-access governmental data plus Web 2.0 tools to interpret those numbers.

We ask the question that has been bumping around ever since Republican presidential candidate John McCain described himself as computer "illiterate" -- In 2008, does a U.S. need to personally understand how to use email, search engines, and other basic online tools and platforms on order to be an effective leader? Take the poll and then let's hash it out in the comments.

John McCain isn't ready to acquiesce the tech vote, claiming in an interview that he understands technology because he has young children, but that just isn't enough.

Yesterday I wrote about getting Lost In Hillaryland while driving down to Philadelphia to volunteer for the Obama campaign. In that post at Kenneth Cole’s Awearness Blog, I write about how after the mini-adventure of the day, my oldest came to the same conclusion as Joe Trippi : that Obama was going to lose.

My son’s observation was the most interesting part of the whole trip because it lent credit to my recent thinking of “politics as interface”.

We studied the candidates' websites and statements, hunting for signs that they understand the importance of the internet and new technology for America's future. The Republican field, with the exceptions of Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, barely escaped flunking.